


hearts have never been this close.

by LLReid



Series: kamilah’s forever. [5]
Category: Bloodbound (Visual Novels)
Genre: Canon LGBTQ Character, Domestic Fluff, F/F, Families of Choice, Family, Family Feels, Family Fluff, LGBTQ Character, LGBTQ Character of Color, LGBTQ Female Character, LGBTQ Themes, Parent-Child Relationship, Parenthood, Romantic Fluff, Romantic Soulmates, Same-Sex Marriage, Sibling Bonding, Tooth-Rotting Fluff
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-09
Updated: 2021-03-09
Packaged: 2021-03-15 09:47:13
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,004
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29931579
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LLReid/pseuds/LLReid
Summary: Inspired by; Maybe The Night by Ben & Ben.~~~~“I am not kissing a dog. Especially not a wet one,” she huffed. “And one of you is going to need to need to hose the sand and salt water off of him before allowing him inside— I swear on all that is holy if this slobbering beast does not leave me alone—““Dobby,” Anastasia said firmly whilst clicking her fingers and pointing at the grass, making the boisterous animal sit obediently. “Good boy.” She reached out and scratched his ears, then looked back to her. “He irritates you so much because you don’t give him attention.”“I refuse to be one of those imbeciles that treats a dog like a child,” she pouted. “In Egypt, household pets used to know their place in the order of things—““Didn’t you worship cats?,” Jax asked.“Cats were seen as religiously significant, yes,” she huffed, “but I assure you that there were no golden retrievers in the hallways of Antirhodos barking at royalty to demand their full and undivided attention!”“Drink your wine, meanie,” Zahra quipped.“Yeah, meanie,” smirked Jax.“I’ll throw you both headfirst in the pool the next time you call me that.”
Relationships: Kamilah Sayeed/Anastasia Sayeed, Kamilah Sayeed/Main Character (Bloodbound)
Series: kamilah’s forever. [5]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2108751
Comments: 8
Kudos: 21





	hearts have never been this close.

The chilled glasses of light white wine in Kamilah’s hands were a jarring contrast to the wall of warm July air that hit her the moment she stepped out of the glass patio doors of the family’s luxurious Southampton mansion. Like many well-to-do New Yorkers, every summer she packed up her wife and children and together they fled Manhattan in the last days of May and didn’t return until the dawn of September, in time for schools returning to session. 

The summer months — when the kids were free of their academic and extracurricular obligations and she and Anastasia could work remotely as much as they liked — were often spent travelling the world. Travel, Kamilah felt, was the best way to broaden their children’s world view and provide them with the sort of cultural experience she and Anastasia felt that they deserved in their formative years. That summer alone they’d already spent five days in Austria and two of those had been spent in Vienna, four days at Villa Manzu in the Papagayo Peninsula in Costa Rica, three days in Paris, a week in their villa on the outskirts of Alexandria, a week travelling around Kazakhstan, three days in Sochi, three days in Singapore, and been on a week long cruise between different Japanese islands on Adrian’s yacht with the whole family— and they still had plans to visit New Zealand and Bali before they returned to the city full time.

Kamilah’s gaze caught the glittering daylight ring on her finger as she stood on the patio and began scanning the huge, perfectly landscaped piece of property she’d had the time of her life designing. The inside of the house was all Anastasia’s handiwork but the garden was her domain, and she meticulously tended each and every flower bed like her life depended on it— and they’d made such a good job of both the inside and the outside of their summer home that the mortals had featured it in the pages of Architectural Digest more than once.

Adrian was stood at the barbecue wearing an apron that said ‘KISS THE CHEF’ and she received secondhand embarrassment just looking at it, and he was doing god only knew what— she didn’t question him, as she and Anastasia had been banned from getting within ten feet of their own outdoor kitchen out of the fear they’d cause a salmonella outbreak. Serafine was sprawled out on a cherry red lilo in the pool with a margarita in her hand and ridiculous heart-shaped sunglasses covering her eyes. Lily was fast asleep on the hammock that had been hung between the two magnolia kobus trees she’d had imported from Japan, the two cats were laying at her side and seemed perfectly happy just to lay there for as long as they could.

Summer was their best season: it was lazing around with the sun blazing over head and not a care in the world weighing them down, or the children trying to camp out in the treehouse Adrian was helping them build; summer was everything good to eat; it was a thousand colours they’d lived without truly seeing in the parched landscape of night until Anastasia had given them back the ability to truly live as mortals did; but most of all, summer was family. They were all together almost all of the time... and it was wonderful.

Her dark eyes filled with light when she spotted Anastasia sat at one of the outdoor seating areas at the boundary line of their private land and the ‘private’ beach that they shared with the neighbours. Their twelve year olds and their boisterous golden retriever could be seen playing on the beach with the neighbour kids and their dogs; running in and out of the water, jumping over waves as they crashed against the shore, and throwing fistfuls of sand at each other’s faces before running away squealing at the tops of their lungs.

She walked briskly down the length of the garden, the fragrant smell of numerous types of flowers and all the bright colours prickling at her attuned senses with every step she took. The peace within and flowing from this sacred space that she and Anastasia had created together was clothed in forgiveness, renunciation, and the reconciliation of her dark and bloody past... and it really was heaven on earth as far as she was concerned.

“You look like you’re on the verge of a nervous breakdown,” she commented as she sat down at the small outdoor table — where they often enjoyed their morning coffee — beside Anastasia. “Who do I need to kill?”

Anastasia laughed softly and leaned into kiss her cheek in thanks for the glass of wine, drawing her attention away from the screen of her laptop. “I wouldn’t complain if you wanted to stab supposedly-acclaimed-scientists who still somehow misinterpret the most straightforward principles of astrophysics and cosmology to reach utterly absurd pseudoscientific conclusions!” She threw a hand up in frustration and heaved a sigh. “The papers I wrote for fun as a child were more coherent than this— I would be mortified to submit a paper like this for peer review... I really don’t understand how someone could write something this bad and somehow remain employed. Anyone who worked for me would be fired on the spot.”

“I’m sorry, but did you just call astrophysics straightforward?,” she snorted.

“Yes!,” Anastasia pouted, her bad mood worsening before her eyes. “It’s like rocket science, much simpler to understand once you know the basics than most people think— and people would realise that if they began studying without any ridiculous preconceived notions that become embedded into their minds—“

“I may not understand one thing about the subjects but, god, I cannot wait to read your scathing peer review of this paper.” She leaned back in her chair and her lips turned up into a wicked smirk as she regarded her. “Hold nothing back, baby.”

That startled a laugh out of her moody wife. Anastasia was such a critically acclaimed scientist under many different branches of the subject that she’d won multiple Nobel Prizes and had achieved multiple doctorate degrees in her life. She was sent literally hundreds of papers to review every week, so many that she couldn’t actually read them all whilst running a company, doing her duties as The Bloodkeeper, raising two children, and being as devoted a wife as she was. Very few of those papers that she did read, however, managed to impress her. She was a woman who was respected equally for her kindness, fairness, and her brains, but that didn’t mean her reviews weren’t brutally honest. People sent her their research knowing the weight her voice held within the scientific community, knowing that she had the power to both make and break careers with a single review, and knowing that she was going to tell them exactly what she thought without any flowery rhymes or embellishments.

Not much brightened her day the way her wife calling people idiots beneath an air of polite professionalism did. It was really quite amusing to see how creative she got when she was publicly calling people imbeciles.

“I just can’t help but wonder how some people even made it out of high school, honestly,” Anastasia huffed, taking a sip of her wine as she closed the lid of her laptop. “It was an interesting theory that Dr. Schroeder was attempting to explore — I’ll give her that much — but everything else was just terrible. Her mathematics were so deeply flawed I had to redo every one of her equations just to attempt to understand what she was trying to say. The layout of the paper makes no sense. Most of her sources are either outdated or have been misinterpreted— she quoted some of my old papers multiple times and has misunderstood my research entirely!” She sighed. “This is why I drink, Kami.”

“No, you drink because you’re married to an ancient vampire with anger issues and the unquenchable desire to stab everyone who so much as looks at her the wrong way, and are the most essential puzzle piece in keeping peace between our society and the mortal world.” She sighed wistfully. “Mortal scientists seeking the opinion of the great Dr. Anastasia Sayeed are the very least of your worries.”

Anastasia reached out and playfully clinked the rim of her glass against hers. “Perhaps that is so,” she mused, “but you’re still going to have to stop me putting Dr. Schroeder on blast. I’m really that annoyed.”

“Do you feel a Trump style social media meltdown coming on?,” she teased.

Anastasia snorted. “Even if I did, you guys banned me from posting things without approval after that time during his presidency that I publicly threatened to make every Republican politician believe they were a goat— and that was decades ago and was technically Lily’s idea.”

She rolled her eyes at the memory of her much younger wife’s drunken Twitter rampage all those years ago. Whilst it had been quite amusing that a single line of text had caused a national security issue, that had been the last time she’d allowed her to make her own cocktails without the supervision of a responsible companion. Now she or Adrian were sent everything she wanted to post online before she posted it, just to make sure that her unfiltered self wouldn’t inadvertently freak out the mortals so much the president would have to be moved to a secret bunker beneath The White House— like that would do a goddamn thing if Anastasia decided she wanted him to act like a goat.

“I’m still not amused by that in the slightest.”

“You’re very amused,” Anastasia huffed, calling her bluff with ease. “You couldn’t even spank me for it without laughing and you still can’t.”

She let out an indignant sound of utter bemusement. “That’s besides the point.”

“Is it, really?”

“It is, really.” She playfully kicked her shins beneath the table, a gesture Anastasia returned right away that sparked a childish game of footsy. “Stop or I’ll try my hand at science and force you to review my paper,” she laughed. “That’s a punishment my inner sadist could really get behind.”

Anastasia’s jaw dropped but the little hellion continued kicking her. “You do that and I’ll be an even more impossible brat than usual. You know how stubborn I can be.”

“You? Stubborn? Never!,” she teased. “You’re the least stubborn person I’ve met in over two thousand years of life—“

“So we get in trouble for kicking each other,” Jax laughed as he, Zahra, and an overly excited Dobby appeared back in the garden, soaked by salty ocean water with wet sand sticking to their bare legs and feet, “but you two kicking each other is fine.”

“Seems hypocritical,” giggled Zahra whilst grabbing the fluffy lilac towel she’d left folded on the end of the table they were sat at. “Does it not?”

“We’re not out for blood,” Kamilah said quickly as the bloody golden retriever jumped at her in search of affection. The wet dog smell was sickening... yet she persevered and gave it a single pat on the head. “When you two decide to start beating each other it is never anything less than a fight to the death. Therein lies the difference.”

“He won’t stop until you give him a kiss, mama,” Jax smirked, bemused at her attempts to ignore the dog pining for her attention.

“I am not kissing a dog. Especially not a wet one,” she huffed. “And one of you is going to need to need to hose the sand and salt water off of him before allowing him inside— I swear on all that is holy if this slobbering beast does not leave me alone—“

“Dobby,” Anastasia said firmly whilst clicking her fingers and pointing at the grass, making the boisterous animal sit obediently. “Good boy.” She reached out and scratched his ears, then looked back to her. “He irritates you so much because you don’t give him attention.”

“I refuse to be one of those imbeciles that treats a dog like a child,” she pouted. “In Egypt, household pets used to know their place in the order of things—“

“Didn’t you worship cats?,” Jax asked with a raised brow. 

“Cats were seen as religiously significant, yes,” she huffed, “but I assure you that there were no golden retrievers in the hallways of Antirhodos barking at royalty to demand their full and undivided attention!”

“Drink your wine, meanie,” Zahra quipped with the biggest shit eating smile on her face. 

“Yeah, meanie,” smirked Jax.

“Meanie?,” she laughed. “I’ll throw you both headfirst in the pool the next time you call me that.”

Zahra smirked at her and studied her intently, as if gauging how serious she was. “Okay,” she said slowly. “Meanie.”

And at that she got out of her seat, and both children started running for their lives and shrieking with glee at the top of their lungs. She grabbed Anastasia’s wrist and pulled her to her feet too, and that was all it took for their game of chase to erupt. One way or another, someone would be ending up in the pool by the end of it.

She just hoped it wouldn’t be her... as she’d already been pushed in fully clothed twice that day and her pride simply couldn’t take much more.

The whole world seemed to smell of roses and salt water as they ran around the garden, their friends watching on in bemusement as they made complete fools of themselves for their children’s enjoyment. The mid-summer sunshine was like powdered gold over the grassy piece of land. Here, in some way, she felt the same way she had as a child herself, like she would be young at heart forever regardless of how many centuries passed her by.

“Mama!,” Jax laughed hysterically as she bundled him into her arms, pulling him straight from the cargo net ladder leading to the treehouse that he was attempting to climb with ease and began carrying him off towards the pool. “This isn’t fair! I don’t do running!”

Zahra screamed with excitement as Anastasia caught her on the in-ground trampoline and threw her over her shoulder. “Moooooooom!”

She and Anastasia locked eyes as they reached the side of the pool and then threw their giggling children into the deep end, making Serafine shriek as the cool water splashed over the side of her lilo. 

“Hell nah! Not my nephew and niece, you bitches!,” Lily screamed at the top of her lungs— and that was the last thing Kamilah heard before she and Anastasia were somehow toppling headfirst into the water. 

The cold was a sharp shock in contrast to the warm temperatures they’d been basking in, and it stung at Kamilah’s bare limbs as she sank beneath the rippling surface of the water. Bubbles floated upwards all around her, just like in the chilled glass of sweet wine she’d been enjoying before, and with a quick glance to her left all she saw was the masses of her wife’s ginger hair dancing weightlessly around her.

“Lily Spencer!,” she shrieked as she surfaced, spluttering and flinching as the dog decided to join them in the pool. The damn thing may as well have caused a tsunami as it hit the water.

“That shit wasn’t me,” Lily deadpanned from her hammock. “I astral projected so hard I glitched the matrix.”

“Your days are numbered, you fool,” she coughed. Though she couldn’t stay mad for long, as the sight of Anastasia and Zahra both struggling to regain control over their long hair that seemed to take on a mind of its own whenever it was wet was just too funny. “Are you two quite alright?”

“Who? Us?,” Zahra laughed whilst flapping her arms wildly in an attempt to untangle the strands that had wound around her limbs. “We’re fine.”

“Yup,” Anastasia huffed, mirroring the bizarre movements Zahra was making. “Everything is perfect.”

“This is fascinating to watch,” Serafine quipped, gazing over the rims of her sunglasses. “What need have we of the city ballet when we can watch this new interpretative form of dance?”

“They look like those inflatable tube guys you see at car dealerships,” Jax laughed, mimicking their movements and making everyone laugh. “Don’t they, Uncle Adrian?”

“They do, buddy,” Adrian called from behind the barbecue.

“Last chance,” Kamilah smiled, “do you need rescuing?”

Anastasia and Zahra both stopped what they were doing and shared an unamused look, before they both nodded their heads. She and Serafine immediately began unwinding masses and masses of tangled hair from around their faces and limbs, as Jax and the dog began racing up and down the length of the pool.

“Ow. Ow. Ow. Ow,” Zahra yelped. “Mama, be gentle!”

“I’m being gentle,” she laughed, steadying the wriggling pre-teen with a hand on top of her head. “You just do not brush your hair thoroughly enough. It’s quite tangled.”

“You try having this much hair and keeping it without tangles!,” Zahra fired back. “It’s not as easy as they made it look in Tangled.”

“What about cutting it?,” laughed Serafine as she struggled with Anastasia. “Short hair is having a moment, no?”

“I would rather be hit by a bus twenty-seven times in a row, set on fire, and then staked by a mewling mortal with a branch with a beehive on the end of it.” Zahra peered through the strands of hair in her face with a look of complete and utter seriousness. “Beauty is pain, Auntie Serafine.”

“Well,” Serafine snorted, “that is a highly specific set of circumstances you’ve thought of, Zahra.” 

“I’m a highly specific individual,” she shrugged.

“No, you’re a theatre kid who acts like she’s on crack 24/7,” quipped Jax.

“And you’re a weirdo who acts like he eats crack for breakfast,” Zahra pouted.

“Guys,” she and Anastasia said at once.

Jax stilled. “I don’t even know what crack means. I heard it on TV and it sounded like an insult, so I said it.”

“Me either,” Zahra shrugged. “I thought it meant, like, asscracks or something— Auntie Lily, what is crack?”

“It’s a drug but lemme tell you, that shit is whack,” Lily wheezed whilst swinging on her hammock. “This one time I got lost in LA when I was trying to find The Cecil Hotel to go ghost hunting and I somehow wound up in this janky-ass crack den on Skid Row where this one guy was—“

“Lily,” Anastasia hissed.

“Shit— I am not filtering at all, am I?” Lily laughed, shaking her head. “It’s a bad drug,” she said quickly. “Like, a real bad one you wanna stay away from at all costs— or I’ll kick your asses, we clear?”

“You couldn’t kick our asses if your life depended on it,” Zahra teased. “But yeah, we’re clear. Drugs are bad news.”

“Pugs not drugs!,” Jax cheered. “I think we should adopt a pug, by the way—“

“We already have one too many animals living under our roof for my liking,” she grumbled. “Over my dead body will one more dog be invited into our home to torment me on a daily basis— I already know far too much about those oversharing mortal dog walkers at the dog park because evidently a golden retriever makes people think it’s perfectly socially acceptable to approach me for casual conversation! The last thing I need is a pug added to the mix— lest those impudent fools try even harder to win my friendship—“

“Only you could make people trying to be your friend sound so torturous,” Serafine huffed. “You ought to simmer down, you old fool.”

“I have three friends and consider that quite enough social interaction out with my household— and those are bold words for someone approaching their eight-hundredth birthday,” she fired back.

“I have only just turned seven-hundred-and-seventy-six years old!,” Serafine cringed. “It is bold for you, who is now two-thousand-one-hundred-and-fourteen years of age, to call anyone old—“

“You decrepit old bat,” she snorted, splashing her oldest friend in an act of childish revenge she was wholly unashamed of. 

“Here we go again,” Anastasia mumbled.

“Sock her, Serafine!,” cheered Lily.

“Please don’t,” Adrian sighed.

“Is that a grey hair I see?,” Serafine teased.

“I’m surprised you can see anything with your deteriorating eyesight,” she fired back. “You certainly don’t seem concerned about your wrinkles, almost like you can’t see them at all.”

“Wrinkles?! Wrinkles?!” Serafine threw her hands up. “You’re one to talk— I’m surprised you didn’t throw out a hip running around earlier—“

“I’m simply surprised you’re still capable of running at all—“

Anastasia wrapped her arms around her shoulders and drew her into a kiss to shut her up. Even though it was only a peck, she felt like she had no breath, no being, but in Anastasia’s, she was her voice; she did not speak a word to her. But she trembled on the words she didn’t have to say out loud for her to hear them; She was her sight, for her eyes followed hers, and saw hers, which coloured all the objects in her field of vision — she had creased to live within herself; she was her life, the ocean to the river of her often muddled thoughts.

“Get a room!,” the twins teased, splashing them amidst dramatic choking sounds that made it sound like they were breathing their last.

Children, she thought. Bloody children.

Serafine snorted and the old fool joined in with the torment. “Yes, get a room and stop making me jealous!”

Jax screwed his face up. “Who are you jealous of? Which one of our moms do you want to kiss?”

“No!,” Serafine practically shrieked. “I shall rephrase that: I am tired of being single and I do not wish to kiss either of your moms! Merde!”

“We know merde means fuck,” Zahra deadpanned, splashing Serafine. “We’ve been fluent in French for years, Auntie Serafine.”

Serafine pinched the bridge of her nose. “Of course you have been—“

“We can also say swear words in Russian, Kazakh, Coptic, Mandarin, Spanish, and Japanese— we can teach you if you want,” Jax smiled.

Kamilah cleared her throat and offered a highly unimpressed glare as Serafine started to laugh uncontrollably. 

“It’s your fault for making sure we can speak more than just English,” Zahra shrugged. “We weren’t just gonna learn the boring words and not the fun words.”

“Fun words,” she muttered below her breath. “I give up.”

“Dinners ready,” Adrian called from the long outdoor dining table that he had piled high with food he’d singlehandedly prepared. 

She, for the most part, didn’t understand why most men she knew liked to barbecue so much. Were it anyone else, she would’ve simply assumed it was the only way they knew how to cook or that perhaps they were pyromaniacs... but Adrian cooked all the time in a regular kitchen. That being said, though, even she knew that cooking and eating food outdoors in the summertime made it taste infinitely better than the same meal prepared and consumed indoors at any other time of year.

The heat of the day meant that they all dried off pretty quickly after climbing out of the water, which was both a blessing and a curse. She’d been rather enjoying the sight of her wife in a wet white tank top.

“How was Dr. Schroeder’s paper, Anastasia?,” asked Adrian as he bit into his cheeseburger.

“For the love of god, do not get her started on this again,” she sighed. “She’s so put out about it that we’re pretty damn close to having to confiscate all of her devices with internet access again!”

Anastasia pouted petulantly whilst nibbling on a piece of iceberg lettuce. “Well it’s no wonder I’m pissed! If you knew how much this woman was reaching— ugh— and she had the audacity to site many of my papers as her sources, which she quite clearly either didn’t understand or just didn’t bother to read properly!”

“That bad, huh?,” sighed Adrian. “I thought her subject matter sounded rather interesting—“

“If it was written properly with accurate research, it would be very interesting,” Anastasia huffed. “I’ll email it to you. You have to read it and then you have to bitch about it with me— I need to get this out of my system before I write my review or I will go off on one.”

Adrian chuckled and took a sip of his beer. “I’ll consume more alcohol than I was originally intending to, in that case.”

“Somebody is gonna have to sedate me if y’all are gonna be ranting about math or some mad scientist shit nobody can understand again,” Lily quipped whilst alternating between taking bites of a hotdog and a cheeseburger. “I didn’t sleep for three nights after y’all tried to explain to me how the universe became conscious of itself with the arrival of humans— the rabbit holes I went down, like, damn... do you know how many nerds talk about this stuff on the internet? It should be illegal to traumatise someone so much they start studying.”

“I’ll put you in a coma any time you wish,” she quipped, eyeing her protégé across the table. “Just say the word.”

Everyone started laughing and the conversation wore on.

One of her favourite things about dining outdoors in a warmer season was that it freed hands and bore skin. When they didn’t need to wear or carry heavy clothing, their bodies felt lighter and their hands were freed for other things. Like pouring expensive bottles of rosé into antique glasses; a direct contrast to the relatively simple and cheap foods that were barbecue staples.

“Who wants to go for ice cream?,” Lily asked the moment she’d finished eating. “Mint choc chip hits different after a barbecue.”

“Me!,” the twins shrieked.

“I’ve eaten so much that I may never eat again,” Serafine chuckled. 

“Same here,” nodded Adrian.

“As have I,” Kamilah yawned. 

“I don’t even like ice cream,” Anastasia giggled. “I liked it when I was pregnant but, yeah, that stopped.”

“Y’all suck,” teased Lily as she looked back at the twins. “Last one at Adrian’s new Lamborghini is a rotten egg!”

At that they all took off sprinting away from the table, calling their goodbyes over their shoulders as they ran.

“You’re taking my car?!,” Adrian laughed. “Just... drive responsibly!”

“Well... it looks like they’re going to be hyped up on sugar all night,” she sighed as she rested her arm on the back of Anastasia’s chair. “I, for one, still intend to retire at a reasonable hour, so dear old Auntie Lily can keep them occupied and deal with the mess she’s about to create until they eventually crash out.”

Anastasia rested her head against her shoulder. “We’re doing those deep conditioner treatments in our hair and those face masks tonight, aren’t we?”

She kissed the top of her head. “Mhm... I also need you to do my eyebrows for me and I’ll do your nails for you.”

Anastasia’s eyes drifted up to study her eyebrows, followed by her finger drifting over the areas that needed tending. Since they’d been only dating Kamilah had been getting her to groom her eyebrows, as hers were always so enviably thick and somehow utterly perfect— and they’d never looked better than when Anastasia had taken over. There was simply nobody else she’d let near her face with tweezers.

“It’s a date.” 

Serafine gulped down the rest of her drink and sighed wistfully. “This is why I need a partner— is it really too much to ask to find someone I can fight back-to-back with, raise children with, have utterly sinful kinky sex with, and yet still settle down and have an occasional night of pampering with?”

Adrian raised an eyebrow. “Are you not currently dating six different people?”

“Well, yes, but none of them are this sort of material!,” she lamented as she gestured across the table at them cuddled together. “This is what I want!”

Kamilah huffed in amusement and the biggest smile spread across her face as Anastasia rested a hand on her thigh beneath the table. The touch was chaste, filled with affection and the gentle sort of possession that still set her heart ablaze after all these years of marriage. 

Odd, she thought, how these seemingly mundane little touches and caresses Anastasia would give her could leave her reeling at just how different her wife was to Gaius. He hadn’t shown her the right sort of affection. He hadn’t done things for her because he knew she’d love them. And she knew now that was wrong. That the relationship with him had been all about him. Not about her. It was about what he could take from her without having to give back. That was all sorts of fucked up and she now knew it was no way for a person to treat a woman they were supposed to cherish and protect.

She kissed Anastasia’s hair again, paying no mind to the conversation happening at the table. The feeling of her thumb soothingly stroking at the bare skin of her inner thigh was all she could focus on. At the woman who loved her so well simply caressing her without any expectation behind the touch.

She knew, perhaps deeper than she’d ever known anything, that she would love her until she drew her last breath and beyond. That she was made for her. That she was the reason she’d Turned at all, because she’d always been meant to find her. 

“Are you paying attention to a single word I’m saying?,” Adrian snorted.

“No,” she replied honestly and without a hint of embarrassment.

“That’s really gay of you, sweetheart,” Anastasia chuckled, knowing exactly where her mind had gone from how close she was holding her.

“Yes. Indeed, it is.” She ran her fingers through the length of her hair. “It’s really very gay.”

~ fin.


End file.
